Their
professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the
fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to
power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously
unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of
every generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energetic
fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public
activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs
so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as
to invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very
existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.
The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, in
the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessary
to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise such will
and purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at hand, one
has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and
incoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution of this
vast new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there
was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible. As one
attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of the new age,
as one measures it against the latent achievement that later years have
demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness, the
insensate unimaginative individualism of the pre-atomic time.
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